authoritarianism

"For the police and intelligence agencies, the propensity to operate in secret is a sine qua non for the deep state, as it provides cover for the maintenance of relationships that under other circumstances would be considered suspect or even illegal... As all governments—sometimes for good reasons—engage in concealment of their more questionable activities, or even resort to out and out deception, one must ask how the deep state differs. While an elected government might sometimes engage in activity that is legally questionable, there is normally some plausible pretext employed to cover up or explain the act... But for players in the deep state, there is no accountability and no legal limit. Everything is based on self-interest, justified through an assertion of patriotism and the national interest."

"I will totally obliterate the deep state. I will fire the unelected bureaucrats and shadow forces who have weaponized our justice system like it has never been weaponized before. And I will put the people back in charge of this country again."

"The refusal by the Trump administration to release the files and videos amassed during investigations into the activities of the pedophile Jeffrey Epstein, should put to rest the absurd idea, embraced by Trump supporters and gullible liberals, that Trump will dismantle the Deep State. Trump is part of, and has long been part of, the repugnant cabal of politicians – Democrat and Republican – billionaires and celebrities who look at us, and often underage girls and boys, as commodities to exploit for profit or pleasure."

"Political scientists and foreign policy experts have used the term deep state for years to describe individuals and institutions who exercise power independent of—and sometimes over—civilian political leaders... Beneath the politics of convenience is the reality that a large segment of the U.S. government really does operate without much transparency or public scrutiny, and has abused its awesome powers in myriad ways."

"For a generation, the people who saw something like an American deep state—even if they rarely called it that—resided on the left, not the right. The 9/11 attacks triggered the rapid growth of an opaque security and intelligence machine often unaccountable to the civilian legal system. In the 2000s, the critique focused on a “war machine” of military and intelligence officials, defense contractors and neoconservative ideologues who, in some versions, took orders directly from Vice President Dick Cheney. In the Obama era, the focus shifted to the eerie precision of “targeted killings” by drones, and then the furor over Snowden, the ex-National Security Agency contractor whose 2013 leaks exposed the astonishing reach of the government’s surveillance. “There’s definitely a deep state,” Snowden told the Nation in 2014. “Trust me, I’ve been there.”"

"Ordinary Americans frequently ask why politicians and government officials appear to be so obtuse, rarely recognizing what is actually occurring in the country. That is partly due to the fact that the political class lives in a bubble of its own creation, but it might also be because many of America’s leaders actually accept that there is an unelected, un-appointed, and unaccountable presence within the system that actually manages what is taking place behind the scenes. That would be the American deep state."

"One who liberates his country by killing a tyrant is to be praised and rewarded."

"Let every dirty, lousy tramp arm himself with a revolver or a knife, and lay in wait on the steps of the palaces of the rich and stab or shoot the owners as they come out. Let us kill them without mercy, and let it be a war of extermination."

"Man has the right to kill those who would thwart these rights."

"Man is only free if he is prepared to kill every hangman and every power magnate if they do not wish to stop their shameful tasks."

"Rebellion Against Tyrants Is Obedience to God."

"Most of the fascist functionaries live as unguarded as I do. I could slip a knife between Max Rafferty's ribs. The Agnews and Du Ponts, the Rockefellers and Morgans, all of the Getty, Hunt, and Hughes types who sneak around in armored cars and jets are just as reachable. ... Hell will be their reward."

"A superabundance of actual wealth in the hands of the few must create hunger, typhus, and other epidemics among the many. The injustice - yea the idiocy - of this state of affairs is evident. The money-bags of course merely shrug their shoulders. This they will continue to do until a rope well tied over their shoulders will end all further shrugging."

"The most unpardonable sin in society is independence of thought. That this should be so terribly apparent in a country whose symbol is democracy, is very significant of the tremendous power of the majority. [...] Evidently we have not advanced very far from the condition that confronted Wendell Phillips. Today, as then, public opinion is the omnipresent tyrant; today, as then, the majority represents a mass of cowards, willing to accept him who mirrors its own soul and mind poverty. That accounts for the unprecedented rise of a man like Roosevelt. He embodies the very worst element of . A politician, he knows that the majority cares little for ideals or integrity. What it craves is display. It matters not whether that be a dog show, a prize fight, the lynching of a "nigger," the rounding up of some petty offender, the marriage exposition of an heiress, or the acrobatic stunts of an ex-president. The more hideous the mental contortions, the greater the delight and bravos of the mass. Thus, poor in ideals and vulgar of soul, Roosevelt continues to be the man of the hour. On the other hand, men towering high above such political pygmies, men of refinement, of culture, of ability, are jeered into silence as mollycoddles. It is absurd to claim that ours is the era of individualism. Ours is merely a more poignant repetition of the phenomenon of all history: every effort for progress, for enlightenment, for science, for religious, political, and , emanates from the minority, and not from the mass. Today, as ever, the few are misunderstood, hounded, imprisoned, tortured, and killed."

"Critic: Are you trying to say that majority tyranny is simply an illusion? If so, that is going to be small comfort to a minority whose fundamental rights are trampled on by an abusive majority. I think you need to consider seriously two possibilities; first, that a majority will infringe on the rights of a minority, and second, that a majority may oppose democracy itself. Advocate: Let's take up the first. The issue is sometimes presented as a paradox. If a majority is not entitled to do so, then it is thereby deprived of its rights; but if a majority is entitled to do so, then it can deprive the minority of its rights. The paradox is supposed to show that no solution can be both democratic and just. But the dilemma seems to be spurious. Of course a majority might have the power or strength to deprive a minority of its political rights. [...] The question is whether a majority may rightly use its primary political rights to deprive a minority of its primary political rights. The answer is clearly no. To put it another way, logically it can't be true that the members of an association ought to govern themselves by the democratic process, and at the same time a majority of the association may properly strip a minority of its primary political rights. For, by doing so the majority would deny the minority the rights necessary to the democratic process. In effect therefore the majority would affirm that the association ought not to govern itself by the democratic process. They can't have it both ways. Critic: Your argument may be perfectly logical. But majorities aren't always perfectly logical. They may believe in democracy to some extent and yet violate its principles. Even worse, they may not believe in democracy and yet they may cynically use the democratic process to destroy democracy. [...] Without some limits, both moral and constitutional, the democratic process becomes self-contradictory, doesn't it? Advocate: That's exactly what I've been trying to show. Of course democracy has limits. But my point is that these are built into the very nature of the process itself. If you exceed those limits, then you necessarily violate the democratic process."

"Even 51 per cent of a nation can establish a totalitarian and dictatorial règime, suppress minorities, and still remain democratic; there is, as we have said, little doubt that the American Congress and the French Chambre have a power over their respective nations which would rouse the envy of a Louis XIV or a George III were they alive today."

"To secure approval one must remain within the bounds of conventional mediocrity. Whatever lies beyond, whether it be greater insight and virtue, or greater stolidity and vice, is condemned. The noblest men, like the worst criminals, have been done to death."

"When an individual endeavors to lift himself above his fellows, he is dragged down by the mass, either by means of ridicule or of calumny. No one shall be more virtuous or more intellectually gifted than others. Whoever, by the irresistible force of genius, rises above the common herd is certain to be ostracized by society, which will pursue him with such merciless derision and detraction that at last he will be compelled to retreat into the solitude of his thoughts."

"The Indian National Congress' concept of nationalism is based on the establishment of a national state of the majority community in which other nationalities and communities have only secondary rights. The Muslims think that no tyranny can be [as] great as the tyranny of the majority."

"These pioneering codifiers of working liberal democracy — from James Madison to Mill — were all agreed on the three fundamental pillars standing in the way of either Caesarist domination or majoritarian tyranny. The first was the inviolable sovereign authority of an elected legislature, without whose consent no laws could be enacted or executed. The second was an independent judiciary committed to upholding the rule of law, from which no one including (and especially) the chief executive would be exempt. The third was the sanctity of freedom of the press and all forms of expressed opinion; a principle most majestically articulated in John Milton’s Areopagitica."

"Men are not infallible; they err very often. It is not true that the masses are always right and know the means for attaining the ends aimed at. “Belief in the common man” is no better founded than was belief in the supernatural gifts of kings, priests, and noblemen. Democracy guarantees a system of government in accordance with the wishes and plans of the majority. But it cannot prevent majorities from falling victim to erroneous ideas and from adopting inappropriate policies which not only fail to realize the ends aimed at but result in disaster. Majorities too may err and destroy our civilization."

"Despite making up only 13 percent of the male population of the United States, black men constitute almost half of the male prison population, and on any given day, nearly a third of all black men in their twenties are in prison, on probation, or on parole. These black men are overwhelmingly from ghetto communities. The high levels of police surveillance, racial profiling, stiff penalties for minor parole violations, felon disenfranchisement laws, and general harassment of young urban blacks intensify their hostility toward the criminal justice system, and invite urban blacks to conclude that they are living under a race-based police state whose intent is to prevent them from enjoying all the benefits of equal citizenship and to contain social unrest."

"We are pretty free in America when you compare us to other nations around the world, but we're not pretty free in America when you compare us to past generations.If you look at the state of what's going on in America right now—and, y'know, in my book I chronicle easily a hundred different cases where government has overreached and encroached on Constitutional liberties of Americans—we're at the point now in America, a little girl can't run a lemonade stand in her driveway without having the local zoning zealots come in and fine her fifty dollars. We're at the point now where elementary school kids down in Georgia have their irises scanned as they board the bus—all in the name of "safety." We're at the point now where nebulous environmental laws prevent homeowners from building a shed in their own back yard because there might be a flood plain issue in a hundred years.This is the America where we're at, and I really implore people to read my book and tell me how we're not in a police state, because my research shows we're right on the cusp."

"I can't even begin to picture how we would deport 11 million people in a few years where we don’t have a police state, where the police can’t break down your door at will and take you away without a warrant... Unless you suspend the Constitution and instruct the police to behave as if we live in North Korea, it ain't happening."

"Some activists lament how few anti-authoritarians there appear to be in the United States. One reason could be that many natural anti-authoritarians are now psychopathologized and medicated before they achieve of society's most oppressive authorities."

"There isn’t any difference between the totalitarian Russian Government and the Hitler government and the Franco government in Spain. They are all alike. They are police state governments."

"The prosecutors have all the power. Not even the judge has discretion, because lawmakers have mostly taken that liberality away in the name of cracking down on crime. This happened all through the 1980s and 1990s, and the prosecutorial dictatorship has entrenched itself to become the norm since 2001. For the last ten years, the police state has had free rein."

"An extreme reflection of the dangers confronting modern social development is the growth of racism, nationalism, and militarism and, in particular, the rise of demagogic, hypocritical, and monstrously cruel dictatorial police regimes. Foremost are the regimes of Stalin, Hitler, and Mao Tse-tung, and a number of extremely reactionary regimes in smaller countries, such as Spain, Portugal, South Africa, Greece, Albania, Haiti, and other Latin American countries. These tragic developments have always derived from the struggle of egotistical and group interests, the struggle for unlimited power, suppression of intellectual free­dom, a spread of intellectually simplified, narrow-minded mass myths"

"These people are politically, socially, culturally, and economically invisible. How many are actually guilty? We can't know. How many could be let out today to make a wonderful contribution to building a productive society? We don't know. How many are completely nonviolent, not even guilty by any normal standard of law but only guilty according to the letter of the current dictatorship? Probably a majority. … Yet the rise and entrenchment of the American police state are rarely questioned.However, in the end, what is really needed is a fundamental rethinking of the notion that the state rather than private markets must monopolize the provision of justice and security. This is the fatal conceit. No power granted to the state goes unabused. This power, among all possible powers, might be the most important one to take away from the state."

"As soon as he became Chancellor... Hitler prevailed upon President Hindenburg to call new elections. ...[H]e hoped to gain enough strength in the Reichstag to pass an Enabling Act, which would allow him to . ...During the campaign, the NSDAP ...exploited the fact that they now had some control... Prussian Minister of the Interior Goering established a 50,000-strong auxiliary police force, including 25,000 SA members and 15,000 SS men. This both legitimised National Socialist terror against their political opponents—especially the Social Democrats and the Communists—and shifted the burden for funding... the NSDAP’s machine... to the state.. claiming it was needed to forestall an imminent revolt from the left. ...[T]his ...heightened the ...hysteria among the electorate, which ...boosted support for the NSDAP."

"The deterioration in police conduct, and the militarization of local police forces, quite simply and quite predictably mirrors the rise of the total state itself.We know that state monopolies invariably provide worse and worse services for more and more money. Police services are no exception. When it comes to your local police, there is no shopping around, there is no customer service, and there is no choice. Without market competition, market price signals, and market discipline, government has no ability or incentive to provide what people really want, which is peaceful and effective security for themselves, their families, their homes, and their property. As with everything government purports to provide, the public wants Andy Griffith but ends up with the Terminator."

"All dictators risk being overthrown by their opponents... [and] therefore need large police forces to protect them. ...The police force in ...their job was to arrest people before they committed crimes. ...All local police units had to draw up lists of people who might be 'Enemies of the State'. They gave these lists to the ... a branch of the SS... [with] the power to do... as it liked. ...'Enemies of the State' ...are [likely] woken ...by a violent knocking at the door. ...[M]en in black uniforms ...[give] three minutes to pack a bag. ...[T]hey take you to the ...police station where you are shut in a cell. ...[D]ays, weeks or months ...[later] ...you are ...told to sign Form D-11, an 'Order for Protective Custody' ...agreeing to go to prison ...[Y]ou are too scared to refuse to sign ...Without ...a trial you are ...taken to a concentration camp where you ...stay for as long as the Gestapo pleases. ...A former prisoner ...described ...'In Buchenwald there were 8000 ...2000 Jews and 6000 non-Jews. ...first ..."politicals" ...many ...in concentration camps ...since 1933 ...many ...accused of having spoken abusively of the sacred ... Fuehrer ...After the "political", the ..."work-shy" is the largest. ...A business employee lost his position and applied for unemployment relief. ...he was informed by the Labour Exchange that he could obtain employment as a navvy on the ...roads. This man, who was looking for a commercial post, turned down the offer. ...[R]eported as "work-shy" ...he was ...arrested and taken to a concentration camp. The next group were the "Bibelforscher" a religious sect ...proscribed ...by the Gestapo since ...members refuse military service. The fourth... homosexuals... To charge this offense is a favorite tactic of the secret police. ...The last class ...professional criminals...'"

"[T]he real key to power in the State—control of the n police force and of the... State Administration—lay with Goering, as Prussian Minister of the Interior. ...In the critical period of 1933-1934, no man after Hitler played so important a role in the Nazi revolution ...His energy and ruthlessness together with his control ...were indispensable to Hitler's success. Goering showed no intention of being restrained ...he enforced his will, as if he already held absolute power. The moment Goering entered office he began a drastic of the Prussian State service, paying particular attention to the senior police officers, where he made a clean sweep in favour of his own appointments, many of them — S.A. or S.S. leaders. ...Goering issued an order to show no mercy to the activities of "organizations hostile to the State" ...Goering continued: "Police officers who make... use of fire-arms in the execution of their duties will... benefit by my protection; those who... fail in their duty will be punished..." In other words, when in doubt shoot. ...All they had to do was ...put a white arm-band over their brown ...or black shirts: they then represented the authority of the State. ...For the citizen to appeal to the police for protection became more dangerous than to suffer assault and robbery in silence. At best, the police... looked the other way; more often the auxiliaries helped ...S.A. comrades ..beat up their victims. This was “legality” in practice."

"[P]erpetrators of the Holocaust were ordinary Germans. Many were not particularly Nazified... not being in the SS or even in the . ...Many of the perpetrators, at least in the police battalions, were older. They were not particularly martial. ...It is not just that perpetrators were ordinary Germans, but that there were also vast numbers of them... The number... who took part in the extermination of the Jew... was greater than 100,000... probably far greater. ...Over 10,000 German camps of various sizes and kinds existed for incarcerating and destroying Jews and non-Jews. ...The German justice center ...catalogued over 333,000 people ...who served ...institutions used to kill Jews and others. ...Nazi authorities ...assigned ...virtually anyone who was available. The perpetrators were not coerced to kill. ...[I]n many units officers announced... they did not have to kill, and... at least nine police battalions... had been informed that they did not have to kill. There is similar evidence for the some... s. There is... evidence... Himmler... issue[d] orders allowing those... not up to the killing... excused... [O]rdinary Germans killed... [T]he... initiative... zeal, and... cruelty... all were found among the ordinary Germans who were the perpetrators of the Holocaust."

"[D]oes America now embody this common description of a police state?Clearly it does. The American government exerts extreme control over society, down to dictating which foods you may eat. Its economic control borders on the absolute. It politicizes and presides over even the traditional bastion of privacy—the family. Camera and other surveillance of daily life has soared, with the Supreme Court recently expanding the "right" of police to perform warrantless searches. Enforcement is so draconian that the United States has more prisoners per capita than any other nation; and over the last few years, the police have been self-consciously militarizing their procedures and attitudes. Travel, formerly a right, is now a privilege granted by government agents at their whim. Several huge and tyrannical law-enforcement agencies monitor peaceful behavior rather than respond to crime. These agencies operate largely outside the restrictions of the Constitution; for example, the TSA conducts arbitrary searches in violation of Fourth Amendment guarantees.As an anarchist, I view all states as police states, because every law is ultimately backed by police force against the body or property of a scofflaw, however peaceful he may be. I see only a difference of degree, not of kind. But even small differences in the degree of repression can be matters of life or death, and so they should not be trivialized."

"Sipo and SD was a conglomerate, formed... when Heinrich Himmler, Reichfuehrer SS, became chief of the German Police. He fused the Criminal Investigative Police (Kripo) and the (the political police) to form the Security Police ( or Sipo) under the command of SS General Reinhard Heydrich. ...[T]he exchange of personnel ...produced an amalgam of party and state agencies that became central to the execution of most of the terror and mass murder of the Third Reich. ...Although no single organization carries full responsibility for the evils of the Third Reich, the SS-police system was the executor of terrorism and "population policy" in the same way that the military carried out the Reich’s imperialistic aggression. Within the police state, even the concentration camps could not rival the impact of Sipo and SD. It was the source not only of the "s" who administered terror and genocide by assigning victims to the camps, but also of the police executives for identification and arrest, and of the command and staff for a major instrument of execution, the . ...Sipo and SD was ...central to many ...controversial developments in the Third Reich—the totalitarian efforts to achieve conformity and to end opposition, the race and resettlement programs, the development and implementation of imperialistic expansion ...The creation of the totalitarian police state as an essential step toward the provides one ...perspective for this study. ...[H]ow [could] a modern of such cultural prestige as Germany... be twisted to Hitler's ends, how so many thousands of functionaries—more ordinary Germans than Nazi extremists or sadists—could be found to execute Hitler's will[?] When the Nazi experience becomes the will of the ... the result is both an alabi... and a smoke screen that obscures insights into how similarly extreme developments might reoccur, perhaps without a Hitler or a German '."

"The steps of Hegel’s decline are here undeviatingly retraced. Hegel, who did not know the socialized proletariat, began by regarding all history as the history of the philosopher, of consciousness and self-consciousness, and ended with the state bureaucracy. The Stalinists use almost the identical phrases. The proletariat’s role in the struggle for socialism is to work harder and harder, while the leadership and organization are left to the "criticism and self-criticism” of the elite, the bureaucracy, the party. Everything depends on the party, on the bureaucracy’s consciousness and self-consciousness of correctness and incorrectness, its direction, its control, its foresight. The masses are merely at the disposal of the party as they are at the disposal of capital. This is the Stalinist philosophy in every sphere, political economy, politics, history, education, literature, art."

"To believe that this vigorous offensive in every sphere is a question of nationalism is a mistake as crippling as the belief that Stalinism betrays the revolution by social-patriotic support of the national state. In every country the Stalinists represent bureaucratic manipulation of the proletariat by the elite, the bureaucracy, the party. They are the extreme limit of the rationalism of the bourgeoisie, uncritical materialism and uncritical idealism. Never before has so gigantic a state mobilized itself with such murderous vigilance to keep the proletariat at work while the leaders and organizers plan. This is the most deadly enemy the proletariat has ever had. Rationalism and counter-revolution have become one."

"For the Stalinist bureaucracy, state-property converts labor "from the drab burden it was under capitalism into a matter of honor and glory, a matter of prowess and heroism.” The intelligentsia tells the workers: You work. The workers, on the other hand, continue to resist speed up and the discipline of accumulated capital, statified or otherwise. This is called by the Stalinists "the old outlook on labor,” a "capitalist survival in the popular consciousness.” This is no longer a question of Soviet youth and textbooks in political economy. It is now the workers counterposing to the bureaucracy another "ideology” which the Stalinists admit "may spread to alarming dimensions.""

"On the surface it appeared that the Stalinist intervention was to defend the materialism of Marx against the idealism of Hegel. In reality the theoretical threat came from the revolutionary dialectical logic. In political economy the Stalinists seek to defend the classless nature of state-property and planning. The theoretical enemy is the theory of state-capitalism. In philosophy they seek to propagate the fiction of the classless nature of rationalism and materialism. The enemy is the proletariat resisting labor discipline by the bureaucracy. Again and again Zhdanov attacked Alexandrov for "objectivism.” The Stalinists are terrified by the obviously growing conviction that there is in Stalinist Russia an "objective” basis for the "struggle of opposites, the struggle between the old and the new, between the dying and the rising, between the decaying and the developing.” Such an objective basis could only be the class struggle. Hence they must purge Marxism of the Hegelian concept of the objectivity of contradiction."

"Since the end of World War II, and particularly with the philosophic systematization of the new idealism in 1947, the ideological mobilization of the bureaucracy has been total. The Stalinist bureaucracy unambiguously proclaims the one-party State of the Plan as the vital foundation of the Soviet system. To believe that this vigorous offensive in every sphere is a question of nationalism is a mistake as crippling as the belief that Stalinism betrays the revolution by social-patriotic support of the national state. In every country the Stalinists represent bureaucratic manipulation of the proletariat by the elite, the bureaucracy, the party. They are the extreme limit of the rationalism of the bourgeoisie, uncritical materialism and uncritical idealism. Never before has so gigantic a state mobilized itself with such murderous vigilance to keep the proletariat at work while the leaders and organizers plan. This is the most deadly enemy the proletariat has ever had. Rationalism and counter-revolution have become one."

"Today, from end to end of the world, men know that democracy is bankrupt. What is to take its place they do not know. The alternative seems to be planned economy and one-party state. This is the philosophical question. But the philosophy of planned economy and one-party state is distinguishable from that of the bourgeoisie only by its more complete rationalism. The labor bureaucracy in power or out of it sees the solution to the crisis of production in scientific progress, greater output. It consciously seeks to plan and organize the division of labor as the means to further accumulation of capital. In ideology it is ready to expropriate those representatives of private property who stand in the way of this complete rationalization. But didn’t this bureaucracy develop out of the working class? It did and it could only have developed out of the working class. It is a product of the modern mass movement, created by the centralization of capital, and holds its position only because of this movement. At the same time it cannot conceive the necessity for abolishing the division of labor in production, the only solution to the crisis in production. By a remorseless logic, therefore, representation of the proletariat turns into its opposite, administration over the proletariat. The end of bourgeois rationalism is this crisis of the revolution and in production."

"The crisis of production today is the crisis of the antagonism between manual and intellectual labor. The problem of modern philosophy from Descartes in the sixteenth century to Stalinism in 1950 is the problem of the division of labor between the intellectuals and the workers."

"So that in the end, the greatest of all the bourgeois philosophers, the most encyclopedic mind that Europe had produced, the founder of the dialectic, in Engels’ words, the maker of an epoch, could not transcend his historic barrier and was recaptured in the rationalist trap from which he had sought so profoundly to extricate European thought. Hegel destroyed all dogmatisms but one – the dogmatism of the backwardness of the masses. Once the revolutionary solution of the contradiction escaped him, he clung to the bureaucracy. The intellectual elite would rescue society and discipline the revolting masses. Reinstated were uncritical materialism, a purely material existence for the masses, and uncritical idealism, the solution of social crisis by the intellectual bureaucracy. We today who have seen Stalinism and the labor bureaucracy the world over can first fully comprehend this, Marx’s essential critique of Hegel. Only the revolutionary proletariat, said Marx, can appropriate the dialectical logic of Hegel. Hegel himself, because he held fast to the intellectual elite, ended up, despite his thoroughgoing analysis of contradiction and negativity, in the crass materialism and crass idealism of the state bureaucracy."

"One of the distinctive features of Stalinist totalitarianism was that no one was safe from persecution and arrest. Even those who were the most supportive were suspected of opposition because it was assumed that these “wreckers” were trying to rise further up the ladder of power and thus be in a position to wreck more."

"Ostensibly, the aim was to strengthen the Soviet Union, to make it the economic, and hence the military, equal of the 'imperialist' powers still ranged against it. Yet Stalin always saw the strategic benefits of industrialization as secondary to the social transformation it implied. By forcing a huge transfer of manpower and resources from the countryside into the cities, he aimed to enlarge at a stroke the Soviet proletariat on which the Revolution was supposedly based. He succeeded: between 1928 and 1939 the urban labour force trebled in size. How precisely this was achieved was something Stalin's star-struck Western admirers preferred to ignore. Even as the working class was artificially bloated in size, around four million people were 'disfranchised' because they had been 'class enemies' before the Revolution. 'Non-toilers' found themselves ousted from their jobs, from schools and hospitals, from the system of food rationing, even from their homes. In Stalin's eyes, all surviving elements of the pre-revolutionary society - former capitalists, nobles, merchants, officiais, priests and kulaks - remained a real threat 'with all their class sympathies, antipathies, traditions, habits, opinions, world views and so on'. They had to be unmasked and expelled from the Soviet body politic. Only in late 1935, after years of denunciations, disfranchisements and all the attendant deprivations, did Stalin seem to signal an end to the campaign against the offspring of 'class aliens' - but only to turn public attention to a new category of 'enemies of the people'."

"It was all economic lunacy, perfectly symbolized by the palm trees the workers at Magnitogorsk built for themselves out of telegraph poles and sheet steel in lieu of real foliage. Collectivization wrecked Soviet agriculture. Forced industrialization misallocated resources as much as it mobilized them. Cities like Magnitogorsk cost far more to support than the planners acknowledged, since coal had to be transported there from Siberian mines more than a thousand miles away. Just heating the homes of miners in Arctic regions burned a huge proportion of the coal they dug up. For all these reasons the economic achievements of Stalinism were far less than was claimed at the time by the regime and its numerous apologists. Between 1929 and 1937, according to the official Soviet statistics, the gross national product of the USSR increased at an annual rate of between 9.4 and 16.7 per cent and per capita consumption by between 3.2 and 12.5 per cent, figures that bear comparison with the growth achieved by China since the early 1990s. But when allowances are made for idiosyncratic pricing conventions, real GNP growth was closer to 3-4.9 per cent per annum, while per capita consumption rose by no more than 1.9 per cent and perhaps by as little as 0.6 per cent per annum - roughly a fifth or a sixth of the official figure. In any case, what do per capita figures mean when the number of people is being drastically reduced by political violence? If there was any productivity growth under the Five-Year Plans - and the statistics suggest that there was - it was partly because so much labour was being shed for political rather than economic reasons. No serious analysis can regard a policy as economically 'necessary' if it involves anything up to twenty million excess deaths. For every nineteen tons of additional steel produced in the Stalinist period, approximately one Soviet citizen was killed. Yet anyone who questioned the rationality of Stalin's policies risked incurring the wrath of his loyal lieutenants."

"All previous distinctions, politics and economics, war and peace, agitation and propaganda, party and mass, the individual and society, national, civil and imperialist war, single country and one world, immediate needs and ultimate solutions – all these it is impossible to keep separate any longer. Total planning is inseparable from permanent crisis, the world struggle for the minds of men from the world tendency to the complete mechanization of men. State-capitalism is in itself the total contradiction, absolute antagonism. In it are concentrated all the contradictions of revolution and counter-revolution. The proletariat, never so revolutionary as it is today, is over half the world in the stranglehold of Stalinism, the form of the counter-revolution in our day, the absolute opposite of the proletarian revolution. It is the totality of these contradictions that today compels philosophy, a total conception. Hence the propaganda ministry of Hitler, the omnipresent orthodoxy of Stalinism, the Voice of America. The war over productivity is fought in terms of philosophy, a way of life. When men question not the fruits of toil but the toil itself, then philosophy in Marx’s sense of human activity has become actual."

"The ways in which Stalinism is returning to Russia are truly insidious. Among the worst is this: In Stalin’s time, Russians denounced others to get their apartments [and jobs]; now, in Putin’s, they claim doctors have said something against the war in Ukraine if they want them fired and replaced with someone who’ll give them the care they want."

"The philosophy of Stalinism is the philosophy of the elite, the bureaucracy, the organizers, the leaders, clothed in Marxist terminology. It is the extreme, the historical limit of the rationalism of the bourgeoisie, carefully organized to look like a new revolutionary doctrine. Stalinism, the ideology of state-capitalism, is the reinstatement of uncritical materialism and uncritical idealism. The materialism is in the accumulation theory: the kernel of all Stalinist-Titoist philosophy is that the worker must work harder than he ever did before. The idealism is in the theory of the party: the leaders, the elite, must lead as they never did before. No one is more conscious of this than the Stalinist bureaucracy itself. At the center of all ideological campaigns in Stalinist Russia is the attitude of the workers toward their work."